The sidewalks where terror breedsBy James Brandonand John Thorne | Contributors to The Christian Science Monitor

GREENWICH, ENGLAND  Outside a small, red-brick mosque, a Muslim in sneakers and a white robe is lecturing a cluster of young men gathered on the sidewalk.

"The London bombings ... were about striking terror into the heart of the enemy," he thunders, just one week after the 7/7 attacks that killed 56 people and wounded hundreds more.

Muslims around the world are being slaughtered, he tells them. "All we ask them is: 'Remove your troops from Muslim lands and we will stop all of this.' " The men nod in agreement. One glances into the baby stroller he's pushing. Car after car races past.

The preacher, who calls himself Abu Osama ("Father of Osama"), is one of a new breed of British radicals thriving at the margins of London's Muslim community.

Young, independent, and streetwise, they are preaching in urban slang outside the confines of Britain's mosques. They are helping teens and 20-somethings beat drugs and alcohol. And they are inspiring a new pool of impressionable young Muslims to consider killing their fellow Britons.

These radical bands constitute a small fraction of London's 1 million Muslims. But their freewheeling ideology - hardened in the jihadi echo chambers of cliques like Abu Osama's - is creating a new subculture within Britain's Islamic community. So far, the growing influence of these informal, maverick groups has gone largely undetected - and unchecked.

As older, camera-courting, foreign-born extremists like Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza al-Masri recede from relevance, their younger counterparts are striking out quietly and independently with a new brand of do-it-yourself radicalism.

"On the ground level, people like Bakri don't communicate with the youth," says Nadim Shehadi, an analyst at Chatham House, a think tank in London. The fragmentation of British radical groups and their dispersal underground, he adds, is the "worst of all possible options."

"When the Muslim Council of Britain [MCB] said 'We must be vigilant,' this pushed [radical groups] underground," says Abdul-Rehman Malik, contributing editor at the Muslim magazine Q-News, based London. As radicals fled to minor mosques and homes, Britain's security services, and even mainstream Muslims, lost track of them.

Abu Osama, just 30, was born and raised here in East London, amid peeling paint and dingy kebab shops. "I know English. I know Britain. But if I live here, I must speak for Muslims elsewhere," he says, stressing that he belongs first to the ummah, or global Islamic community.

Abu Osama's faith deepened early. Watching his Pakistani immigrant father struggle to support his family of seven, he sought strength in Islam.

"All we ask them is: Remove your troops from Muslim lands and we will stop all of this."

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This quote tells it all. The crux of the entire problem is that the Muslims consider anywhere they live as Muslim lands. That includes the UK, Germany, France, the USA, etc. Why is that so hard for some to understand?? They consider the entire world "theirs".

Hahaha. That is funny. (Ashamed) Exactly what the Brits felt like c. 100 years ago. Exactly like America (& the rest of the west) behaves today.

btw. I don't think that was the point of the article at all.

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Lame reply. The Koran says the world belongs to Islam. You see it here in the USA. You see it in many places. As Muslims grow in population, they consider the lands they occupy theirs. If you can't put forth a counter argument based on facts, don't bother at all. America nor the west considers the world "theirs". We consider it OURS. As in belonging to EVERYBODY. Do you think Muslims just popped up in Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand, souther Philippines, etc.? Nope, they migrated to those areas and once they had a large enough population, they declared those lands "theirs" and they ran the "infidels" out. Sorry if you are too PC to see the truth.

And BTW, I didn't say that was the point of the article... I just pointed out how the cleric exposed the truth about their aims.

Lame reply. The Koran says the world belongs to Islam. You see it here in the USA. You see it in many places. As Muslims grow in population, they consider the lands they occupy theirs. If you can't put forth a counter argument based on facts, don't bother at all. America nor the west considers the world "theirs". We consider it OURS. As in belonging to EVERYBODY. Do you think Muslims just popped up in Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand, souther Philippines, etc.? Nope, they migrated to those areas and once they had a large enough population, they declared those lands "theirs" and they ran the "infidels" out. Sorry if you are too PC to see the truth.

And BTW, I didn't say that was the point of the article... I just pointed out how the cleric exposed the truth about their aims.

July 22, 2005: The Islamic militants are trying to do some ethnic, and religious, cleansing in the Moslem south. The three southern provinces have a population of some 1.8 million, and only 360,000 of those are Buddhists (the religion of the majority of Thais, who are ethnically different from the Moslems, who are Malays). The terror campaign is having some success, as some ten percent of the southern Buddhists have left the south in the past six months. But many of the remaining Buddhists are arming and preparing to defend themselves, and stay in the south...(lots more dealing with the past weeks and what has transpired...)

This quote tells it all. The crux of the entire problem is that the Muslims consider anywhere they live as Muslim lands. That includes the UK, Germany, France, the USA, etc. Why is that so hard for some to understand?? They consider the entire world "theirs".

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I have been telling you this since I first came here. The Muslims DO NOT want Engand, Europe or America. They consider those places "Godless" and generally secular in nature. They want their original homeplace, the Middle East countries.
This is one of the original demands of Osama bin Laden. He has long stated that the "jihad" would only continue as long as Americans had a military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other Muslim countries. Go back to the time of the original rise of militant Islamic terrorism and read it for yourself.

This is what I don't understand about the Bush logic. He has vowed to do ANYTHING necessary to "stop terrorism." Yet, he refuses to consider doing the one thing that would stop it. Why is this so difficult to understand?

I have been telling you this since I first came here. The Muslims DO NOT want Engand, Europe or America. They consider those places "Godless" and generally secular in nature. They want their original homeplace, the Middle East countries.
This is one of the original demands of Osama bin Laden. He has long stated that the "jihad" would only continue as long as Americans had a military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other Muslim countries. Go back to the time of the original rise of militant Islamic terrorism and read it for yourself.

This is what I don't understand about the Bush logic. He has vowed to do ANYTHING necessary to "stop terrorism." Yet, he refuses to consider doing the one thing that would stop it. Why is this so difficult to understand?

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As free pointed out they migrate then claim the area as Islams...if they only wanted the Middle East then why are they migrating...geeez...wake the hell up!

Muslims have been "migrating" for centuries!! Why would they suddenly want to "claim" other lands? This is merely an exaggerated hate claim spread by fanatics who wish to see all non-Christian groups destroyed.

Funny you would make the "migrating" claim, though. Many Muslims claim that the Jews have been "migrating" in their attempt to "take over the world." America has already been "occupied."

People need to quit hyperventilating and go back to the original tenets of the Muslim clerics. If Western forces left Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the Muslims would go back to attacking each others. Which is what they did for thousands of years.

Muslims have been "migrating" for centuries!! Why would they suddenly want to "claim" other lands? This is merely an exaggerated hate claim spread by fanatics who wish to see all non-Christian groups destroyed.

Funny you would make the "migrating" claim, though. Many Muslims claim that the Jews have been "migrating" in their attempt to "take over the world." America has already been "occupied."

People need to quit hyperventilating and go back to the original tenets of the Muslim clerics. If Western forces left Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the Muslims would go back to attacking each others. Which is what they did for thousands of years.

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